Cross-agent and cross-channel customer experience declines in financial services sector, research study finds

Online, March 10, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Mountain View, Calif. (March 10, 2010) - eGain Communications Corporation (OTC BB: EGAN.OB), the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for on-site and on-demand deployment, today announced that the North American financial services sector showed improvement in many customer service channels but declined in cross-channel and cross-agent customer experience in 2010, when compared to 2009.
eGain's 2010 State of Customer Service Study evaluated multiple aspects of web self-service and contact center customer service of 175 leading enterprises in the U.S. and Canada. These companies are equally distributed across eight sectors: financial services, retail, communications, consumer goods manufacturing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. The financial services sector included companies across banking, brokerage, asset management, and diversified financial services.
Analysts used a "mystery shopping" approach. Customer service was performance along multiple dimensions: choice of communication channels, email response, web self-service, cross-channel consistency, cross-agent consistency (phone channel) and phone customer service*. Scores in these metrics were then abstracted to an overall Service Quotient (SQ) on a scale of 0.0 to 4.0, for each of the companies that were assessed, as well as for each industry sector and the overall market.
The numeric scores map to the following ratings:
 Poor (=1.0 and =2.0 and